Fast action by nurses saves Abe’s Amble runner’s life

Prescott Paulin, 28, was a quarter-mile from the finish line at the Abe's Amble 10K race on Sunday when he went into cardiac arrest and collapsed.

By Tobias WallStaff Writer

“Yesterday, I was out at the races.”

That's what Prescott Paulin, 28, of Forsyth wrote down on a slip of paper from his hospital bed at Memorial Medical Center Monday. It was something doctors asked him to do so they could judge whether his brain was functioning normally.

Just the day before, on Sunday, it wasn't certain whether Paulin would live past lunchtime.

Paulin, a former Marine who left the Corps as a first lieutenant in 2010, was a quarter-mile from the finish line at the Abe's Amble 10K race on the last day of the Illinois State Fair when he went into cardiac arrest and collapsed.

“I was at the finish line helping announce runners as they came in,” said Emily Bernardes, coordinator of the race. “Within seconds, somebody is sprinting down to me saying, ‘You have a runner down.'”

Bernardes ran out to where Paulin was prone on the pavement. There, she saw two nurses — colleagues Holly Dahlquist and Nicole Rottinghaus, both of Springfield — assessing Paulin.

“We laid him down, and I kept his airway open,” Rottinghaus, a nurse anesthetist at Springfield Clinic, said Tuesday. “At some point, his pulse got weak. He stopped breathing.”

Dahlquist recounted it the same way, saying, “He quit breathing and his pulse was going out, so we started CPR.”

Dahlquist, an administrative and surgical recovery nurse at Springfield Clinic, said both she and Rottinghaus didn't know they were working together until they looked up at one another during their rescue efforts.

A few runners who were passing by stopped and made a human wall so other runners would stay out of the way of rescue efforts. Two doctors who had been running in the race stopped and quietly observed Dahlquist and Rottinghaus's teamwork.

It took three rounds of 30 chest compressions from Dahlquist and rescue breaths from Rottinghaus before Paulin's pulse strengthened and he started breathing again.

Five minutes after that, an ambulance arrived and rushed Paulin to Memorial.

‘Into nurse mode'

Running 10 kilometers is exhausting and so is performing CPR, but Dahlquist, who had just finished running the 6.2-mile race, did both. She said the physical effort didn't faze her.

“Just jumped into nurse mode,” she said. “I had someone ask me at work (the next day) ‘Was it frightening?' No. It was just something we're trained to do and we did it.”

Paulin survived.

“The last thing I remember, I think about mid-point in the race, I remember grabbing a cup of water and taking off and drinking the water,” Paulin said from his hospital bed Tuesday. This kind of thing doesn't happen to him, he said.

Compared to his time in the Marine Corps and an experience hiking through Laos, 10K races are “nothing.”

“That was the toughest thing I've ever done (hiking in Laos), tougher than anything the Marine Corps ever threw at me,” Paulin said. “So for me to pass out and go into cardiac arrest on a 10K? No way in hell.”

Paulin's father, Pete, said getting the news that his son was suddenly fighting for his life was “disembodying.”

“It's so powerful it doesn't process as it comes in, but you go into an automatic mode,” he said. “It could be akin to shock, I don't know what you would call it.”

Paulin's mother, Kit, said she was sitting in church when Pete got the call from the hospital.

“When Pete got the phone call, I was sitting there in church praying and I get this hand that grabs me and drags me out and we run over here,” Kit said.

Right place, right time

Pete remembered a nursing supervisor telling him that patients who've suffered cardiac arrest outside a hospital have a scant 2 percent chance of making a full recovery.

“The fact that he (Prescott) made it through that 98 percent net is just … wow,” he said. “He had the most superlative level of care. I could not conceive of any higher possible level of care any place in the country. That, as a parent, is heart-rending.”

Paulin's parents are especially appreciative of Dahlquist and Rottinghaus, who rushed to their son's aid and quickly administered emergency care when seconds could mean the difference between life and death.

“We were at the right place at the right time. It was definitely ordained,” Rottinghaus said.

“We do it for strangers. We do it for anyone,” Dahlquist said. “We never once questioned it.”

Paulin said his experience reaffirms an understanding he arrived at a few months ago after a period of self-reflection.

“Where I am is where I should be at this point,” he said. “I don't feel any desires to have anything else, there's not anything that's missing. So it feels good to wake up to that.”

And when Paulin's ready to run again, his brother, Parker, who flew in from Manhattan to visit, joked that Prescott could finish the Abe's Amble next summer and set the record for the event's longest time.

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